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CNAS Announces the NextWare Cyber Collaboration Toolkit

Washington, December 7 – The Center for a New American Security (CNAS) today launched the NextWare Cyber Collaboration Toolkit, a web native, prototype toolkit that provides cybersecurity practitioners a set of interactive, collaborative tools designed to encourage clearer communication and coordination between specialists approaching cybersecurity from a variety of technical and non-technical perspectives when developing solutions to endemic cybersecurity challenges.

The Toolkit is a product of The NextWare Sessions project, led by Ben FitzGerald, Senior Fellow and Director of the Technology and National Security Program at CNAS. The NextWare Sessions and the development of the NextWare Cyber Collaboration Toolkit were supported by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation’s Cyber Initiative.

Cybersecurity is a complex, multi-disciplinary field that grapples with an infinitely varied and constantly shifting threat landscape. While advances are occurring within various disciplines—technical, legal, and policy, for example—cybersecurity is not maturing holistically as a field. The lack of consistent interaction and integration between disciplines hinders our ability to take full advantage of available tools and implement effective solutions at scale.

The NextWare Sessions convened a select group of experts across a variety of cybersecurity specializations in Washington, D.C. and Silicon Valley to consider cross-disciplinary, collaborative methods to build better cybersecurity solutions. Their discussions informed the methods included in the NextWare Cyber Collaboration Toolkit.

The purpose of the NextWare Cyber Collaboration Toolkit is to make the case for broader, more deliberate collaborations across disciplines, to share prototype tools designed to overcome natural impediments to collaboration, and to spark further action. As an open source resource published under a Creative Commons license, the Toolkit is intentionally designed to allow others to share, adapt, and enhance its content. Continuous improvement of the collaborative methods provided in CNAS’ Toolkit will help advance critical thinking in cybersecurity and yield more complete, actionable solutions to cybersecurity challenges.

You can follow developments on the NextWare Sessions website and on the CNAS NextWare Sessions webpage. Please visit our GitHub page to access the original source code behind the NextWare Cyber Collaboration Toolkit. To participate in discussion on twitter, use #NextWare.